City of Pain and Rapture: Reflections in an Urban Eye

By FRANCIS X. CLINES;

Published: May 31, 1992

"I was explaining to you about the rapture," the tall, Bible-toting black man suddenly announced, standing solemn as Socrates within the Lexington Avenue local as he moved through another day of subway proselytizing. "What is the rapture?" the handsome, thin-faced man asked rhetorically of riders clinging fervidly to their various inattentions. The doors slid shut and he rode on out of the station with his answer lost in the steely noise of the city.

The passing reminder that there might be rapture for someone in the toughness of New York, and that a man felt compelled to move through the city's innards to tell about this, was weird welcome enough for a reporter returning home to the city after 13 years. On renewed sight, the city seems as good and sad and true as ever, when viewed in all its shards, and the search for rapture is understandable. Ruthless Regeneration

The city remains regenerative in a certain ruthless way, as out in the marshes beyond the runways of Kennedy International Airport, where the Norway rat breeds better than the snowy owl in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. There, Don Riepe, city born and bred in the Ozone Park shadows of Aqueduct Race Track, has chosen a strange life in the city, reigning as chief ranger for the wildlife refuge.

In this job, he attends to such minor poetic justices as helping his fellow ranger, Bob Cook, cart garter snakes and green snakes back from suburban development tracts to the 9,000-acre marshland refuge in Queens, where such snakes were last seen hieing from vacant lots when the postwar building boom finished off the borough's last green swatches four decades ago.

In the magnificent National Park Service refuge, where a lethally beaked greater yellowlegs can poise still and graceful as the World Trade Center on the western horizon, Mr. Riepe watches for warblers, egrets and ospreys. Then again, he occasionally spies a floater, a human corpse dispatched by killers in the underworld to bob amid the bay reeds.

"At least 8 in the past 12 years," Mr. Riepe says as if they were a special New York fauna, corpus urbanus, to be tallied along with the even rarer sooty tern and the rufus-necked stint. He speaks with a flat Queens accent that sounds refreshing from someone in a traditional ranger's uniform who wants no part of working the Rockies or any other great outdoors beyond the city's wildlife preserve out where the A train ends.

"When I want to get away from this I go flamenco dancing in Manhattan," says the ranger. He really is known for organizing flamenco exhibitions with fellow enthusiasts at such Queens places as Danny's Szechuan Garden on Cross Bay Boulevard. Ebb Tide Music On Sunwashed Piers

So goes the ranger's rapture. Further west along the city shore, other humans teem differently on a hot and sunny day out along the old Steeplechase pier on Coney Island, off West 17th Street. They are crabbing with chicken legs as bait and with boomboxes full of Latin music to spice the city's ebb tide. To a returning New Yorker, the scene contains the reassurance that the poor retain the knack for having more varied public fun together in larger crowds of far more rambling families than the rich usually do.

They dance on the pier in different groups to different songs, cooking sizzling dishes above the ocean. They gamble cheaply in the breeze at their own illicit gaming tables, quenching thirsts with cold beers and elaborate rum and fruit-punch drinks made by a happily profiteering vendor tending bar from a converted Good Humor cart.

Nostalgia has long since ravaged Coney Island, with weeds lushly growing up a rusted roller coaster that stands oddly amid the later world of public housing. The pier scene, with the laughter and flavor of fresh immigrants, is a remembrance that liberalism and left-wing politics used to flourish in the city for people such as these.

"Socialism is dead and liberalism is discombobulated," Raymond S. Franklin says flatly, as if the city were a noir tale with the denouement finally as clear as wet asphalt at night.

This New Yorker talks not quite like the Queens College professor of economics that he is as founder and director of the Michael Harrington Center. This is a scholarly research memorial to the city's late, last Socialist, Mr. Franklin's drinking buddy from the old days when the antipoverty program was generating hope and community organization among the ghetto poor.

"I can't go out in the morning without a dozen quarters," says the professor, less a social strategist these days than a confessed easy touch for the waves of beggars who have taken unabashed hold of the city's streets. "They're unbelievable," he admits. "Still, they put in a day."

As a professor, Mr. Franklin measures this phenomenon mainly as another jagged New York irony: He traces it to the end of the old single-room-occupancy hotel problem of his Upper West Side Manhattan neighborhood, with the poor retreating from real-estate developers only to return as the current plague of homeless.